Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably heard President Obama unveil a detailed plan-23 executive orders, mind you- yesterday detailing how his administration will “properly address gun violence” in response to the Sandy Hook massacre.

It’s no secret that this administration and many on the Left disparage law-biding gun owners. This president claims to respect the Second Amendment and our Constitution, but his actions and abuses of power as President of the United States point to the opposite.

The question beckons: Why must the few yet tragic criminal acts of violence define how guns should be viewed in our society? What about all the unreported stories of women and men using guns to defend themselves and their families against attack from burglars and other criminals? Why can’t this administration shed light on these positive stories rather than vilify the Second Amendment? Simple: they don’t care about the Second Amendment or what we think.

Below is an outline of the 23 executive orders you must make yourselves aware of:

The following is a list, provided by the White House, of executive actions President Obama plans to take to address gun violence.

1. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.

2. Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.

3. Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system.

4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.

5. Propose rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.

6. Publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.

Today’s level of civility can’t match yesteryear’s. Many of today’s youngsters begin the school day passing through metal detectors. Guards patrol school hallways, and police cars patrol outside. Despite these measures, assaults, knifings and shootings occur. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2010 there were 828,000 nonfatal criminal incidents in schools. There were 470,000 thefts and 359,000 violent attacks, of which 91,400 were serious. In the same year, 145,100 public-school teachers were physically attacked, and 276,700 were threatened.

What explains today’s behavior versus yesteryear’s? For well over a half-century, the nation’s liberals and progressives — along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the courts — have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. These people taught their vision, that there are no moral absolutes, to our young people. To them, what’s moral or immoral is a matter of convenience, personal opinion or a consensus.

During the ’50s and ’60s, the education establishment launched its agenda to undermine lessons children learned from their parents and the church with fads such as “values clarification.” So-called sex education classes are simply indoctrination that sought to undermine family and church strictures against premarital sex. Lessons of abstinence were ridiculed and considered passé and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills and abortions. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions with neither parental knowledge nor consent.

Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette, not laws and government regulations, are what make for a civilized society. These behavioral norms — transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings — represent a body of wisdom distilled through ages of experience, trial and error, and looking at what works. The importance of customs, traditions and moral values as a means of regulating behavior is that people behave themselves even if nobody’s watching. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct so as to produce a civilized society. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. The more uncivilized we become the more laws that are needed to regulate behavior.

Parents, not the government, should teach their kids right from wrong with respect to handling guns. It is also parents, not the government, that should reinforce values and raise their children to be productive members of society. Teaching children about proper gun use will not be a detriment to a child’s upbringing; it’ll prove to be a benefit.

The Second Amendment is not simply about hunting, fishing, or shooting. It’s there as a reminder to protect ourselves against any threat of tyranny. It reads, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”